Cannabis Cream Clears Acne, Says Aussie Docs

There could soon be a reason to be buddy up to the pizza-faced kid in your math class: maybe he can get you the hookup on some prescription cannabis cream. That’s if the dreams of some weed researchers from down under have their way.

The Australian pharmaceutical company Botanix is developing a new acne treatment that reacts to the cannabinoid receptors in the face and gets them to shrink up those blackheads and whiteheads.

If it clears further testing and regulation hurdles, this cream would be the first new alternative for acne treatment in 20 years, according to The Daily Telegraph. The most widely used treatments currently include antibiotics and the drug Roaccutane, which in the US requires that patients be put under a suicide watch program and has been tied to birth defects.

As with those using oopioid pain relievers and chemical epilepsy treatments, cannabinoid-based medicine could provide a safer alternative to acne patients. According to the study, the cannabis cream “has an excellent safety profile, with little to no skin irritation and no severe adverse events were recorded.”

Botanix has been busy testing out their cannabis creams, isolating different cannabinoids to see which ones are the most effective in treating the skin disease. During their first human trial, the company founds that “CBD has potential as a promising therapeutic agent for the treatment of acne vulgaris,” according to the study.

But don’t look for the product on the shelves just yet. The company is now developing a synthetic version of cannabidiol (though they could presumably just put CBD oil in a cream with other agents). They also need to take the treatment through what’s phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials (involving higher doses and a lot more patient guinea pigs).

For that, Botanix wants to move their research from Australia to the US, because the states have a better infrastructure for clinical trials. We don’t, however, make things too easy on cannabis researchers in this country, so we’ll see how that goes.